In Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s mammoth, six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, the trivial and the momentous mix, change places, and push the work beyond the limits of categorization. At once a Proustian chronicle of the everyday and a latter-day account of a man’s need for, if not a room, then a few hours of his own in which to write, Knausgaard’s work—a controversial sensation in Norway—has been called “the most significant literary enterprise of our time.” In a series of generous, thoughtful e-mails—some sent from “a balcony in a hotel in Beirut,” where the writer was attending the Hay Literary Festival, others from his home in Sweden—Knausgaard shared with me his thoughts on telling everything, writing the mundane, and committing “literary suicide.”